4 Healthy Feeding Tips for Babies

You don’t necessarily need a healthy baby feeding guide as long as you are careful with what you feed your newborn and regulate what he/she consumes in the first year and a half. While a few recent studies have related childhood obesity to rapid weight gain in infancy, your job as a mother is to be particular about healthy feeding and making sure your child’s development does not suffer in the early stages. Here we have given 5 tips you should keep in mind to ensure healthy baby feeding.

Realize when your baby is full

Generally when a baby pulls away from feeding, closes eyes or spits out milk, it is a sign that it has had enough for the time being. However, most mothers continue to force the baby to feed more or finish the bottle, which obviously leads to over feeding. If on the other hand, your baby is not properly feeding throughout the day, you might want to check up with your doctor to make sure the baby is not coming down with anything.

Don’t use food as a pacifier

It is common for infants and newborns to fuss or cry despite having fed properly. In such a case, most mothers try to give the baby more food to soothe it. Instead of doing this next time, you should try either giving the baby an actual pacifier or carrying it up and singing to it. Just like adults end up overeating when they turn to comfort food, babies don’t need food every time they are fussy, especially if they fed recently.

Solids are merely complementary in the first year

Breast milk forms the major source of nutrition for babies in the first year and they don’t really need anything else. However, typically babies can start taking solid food after about 6 to 7 months, which is encouraged as a practice exercise. The point of feeding a baby solid food is to slowly help it get used to eating food rather than simply drinking milk. If you start force feeding your baby solid food along with breast milk, you are going to be over-feeding it unnecessarily.

Monitor your baby’s weight

The rule of thumb is that a baby should double its birth weight in around 4 months and the first year should see the birth weight tripled. You should regularly weight your baby and keep a chart with you if you are concerned about overfeeding and weight gain. If your baby ends up exceeding these calculations, you might want to take your weight chart along for your next visit to the pediatrician.